Here’s the Fortune 500 company targeted in France’s terrorist attack

Air Products & Chemicals didn’t think it was a prime target for terrorists.

But on Friday the company confirmed that a car crashed into a factory that is owned by the company near Lyon, France, and caused an explosion. Two people were injured. A decapitated body and severed head were found at the scene of the attack.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of life and want to express our sympathies to the family of the victim of this unspeakable tragedy,” the company said in a statement. The company did not say whether the people injured or the person killed were employees of the company, but Air Products did say that all of its employees had been evacuated and were accounted for.

Air Products APD is a Fortune 500 company that ranked 284th on this year’s list. The company sells specialty gas and chemical products to a range of companies in the energy, electronics, and manufacturing industries. The company is based in Allentown, Penn. It employs 21,050 people, and has operations in 50 countries around the world.

The company’s biggest shareholder is shareholder activist hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who owns almost 10% of the company.

In late 2006, the Council on Foreign Relations highlighted chemical factories as a target for terrorist attacks. Back in 2002, a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review report found very little security at dozens of chemical plans around the U.S. But the fact that no one appears to have been directly killed in the attack on Air Products could signal that precautions had been put in place.

The Fortune 500’s biggest food, beverage, and tobacco companies

The largest food and tobacco companies on the Fortune 500 have a big problem. Nearly all of the companies saw their ranking slip in 2014.

Of the top 10 food, beverage and tobacco companies on the Fortune 500, nine out of 10 dropped in the rankings last year, with only chicken producer Tyson Foods TSN earning a higher spot (climbing ten spots to No. 83). And more broadly, of the 25 food, beverage and tobacco companies that are on the Fortune 500 list, only four were able to increase their ranking last year. Profits and earnings have broadly declined for many of the firms within those sectors.

For the tobacco industry, the decline isn’t a surprise. Though the industry aims to prop up results with new products like e-cigarettes and by increasing prices for traditional cigarettes, people are smoking less.

But for Big Food, executives are facing a newer challenge: consumers are increasingly skeptical of big brands that fill up grocery aisle shelves. Instead, smaller niche players are stealing market share. Consumers are also buying more fruits, vegetables and meats on the perimeter of grocery stores. That’s hurting the cereal, snack and soda makers that stock shelves with processed foods that are falling out of favor with more and more Americans.

Still, Big Food is still top dog for now. Here is a look at Fortune’s 10 largest food, beverage and tobacco producers.

Mic’s plans to become a millennial media powerhouse

Digital media startup Mic has kept a lower profile than its venture-backed peers BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Vice Media, and even Refinery29. While those companies have made headlines for splashy, big-name hires, massive rounds of funding, and fast-growing audiences of young readers, Mic, previously known as PolicyMic, has quietly built up an audience of 30 million monthly unique visitors, according to its internal measurements. (ComScore puts that number at 16 million.) The company has madea few headlines this year: It rejected a buyout offer from Twitter. And it fired a news director who was caught plagiarizing.

Now, Mic joins the ranks of its well-funded peers, having raised $17 million in new funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. That round brings Mic’s total funding to more than $32 million. The company has also scored a big-name hire that will lend journalistic integrity to the company: Madhulika Sikka, the former executive editor of NPR, who will run its newsroom and increase its headcount from 45 people to more than 100.

Altchek says his team had been looking to bring on someone like Sikka for the past six months. In addition to running a newsroom with more than 100 people, she understood the way to balance multiple platforms including video and radio. Sikka is also is also “super cool and gets our generation at a fundamental level,” Altchek says.

Mic hasn’t reached the scale of other millennial-whisperers like BuzzFeed, which claims 200 million monthly unique visitors, or Vox, which claims 150 million uniques. But Altchek plans to build Mic into “one of the biggest new media companies out there,”without the same mass audience scale, he says. He aims to accumulate between 40 million and 50 million monthly unique visitors. Any more, and the site loses its ability to charge premium ad rates. Rather, the site will sell targeted to its smaller audience of college-educated millennial readers.

“We don’t want to be a 100 million, 200 million monthly unique site in the U.S. because that means there is nothing premium about us,” he says. Referring to the relatively small scale of valuable legacy media companies like CNN, News Corp. or the New York Times, he added, “There are not 100 million super affluent people in the U.S.”

Mic began monetizing in December with sponsored content and video ads. The company has closed six-figure advertising deals with such brands as Grey Goose, GE, and Microsoft, and will soon close seven-figure deals, he says.

As the site grows in scale, Mic will also grow up with its millennial audience. “We’re going to definitely age with millennials,” Altchek says, rather than stay focused on 20-somethings. He noted the sheer size of the millennial generation, defined as ages 18 to 34. The category is expected to become larger than the Baby Boomer generation this year, according to Pew. It is also larger than the “post-millennial” generation that follows it.

The thing that makes Mic’s content millennial, Altchek says, is its smart, approachable voice, and the simple fact that its content is optimized for all the new platforms and devices its audience consumes news on. “We’ve built our company around this generation, and previous companies built their companies around previous generations with previous ways of doing things that just no longer apply,” he says.

That message was clear at a Friday afternoon meeting attended by Fortune in March. Held in the small kitchen of the startup’s West Village office, Mic’s young, stylishly-dressed employees bequeathed high-fives to each other for various accomplishments throughout the week (a good story, or landing a new advertiser) and took turns asking questions to Altchek and other members of the management team. Top of mind was when the company would move – it was already on the verge of outgrowing its office space.

Marissa Mayer: Why Yahoo-AOL never happened

A merger between AOL and Yahoo, two classic, ad-driven Internet stalwarts that have struggled to return to their early dominance, was the stuff loud-mouthed shareholders dreamed of. When the rumors of such a deal sprung up late last year, the armchair analyses ricocheted around the Web, spelling out the upsides of the merger.

Last week, Verizon’s $4.4 billion takeover of AOL dashed those hopes. Tonight at a Fortune Most Powerful Women dinner in New York City, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer explained why such a deal never happened.

There was some overlap on the two companies’ video strategies, she conceded. But where AOL made a big bet on programmatic advertising, Yahoo has been focused on its “MaVeNS” businesses: mobile, video, native advertising, and social. (Fun fact: Mayer’s husband, an apparent Scrabble aficionado, came up with the acronym on the morning of the earnings call in which Mayer revealed it.)

“Some people on the outside saw similarities between the companies,” she said in an on-stage interview. “We didn’t.” It is more important to Mayer that Yahoo maintains its relationship and brand with its users and continues to provide services that those users value, “not simply help other sites monetize,” she said.

“Republishing other content partners is good, but doesn’t give you a voice or differentiate you,” Mayer said. One way Yahoo has differentiated is through the acquisition of expensive talent, such as newscaster Katie Couric, who was in the audience. Mayer noted that, based on ads sold against Couric’s video content, the hire has been a profitable investment “by all means.”

Would Yahoo ever do a merger similar to that of AOL, for greater distribution? Mayer dodged the question but did not rule it out. She noted that Yahoo is constantly looking for new distribution partnerships, similar to its deal with Mozilla, the web browser, and others it has struck with mobile carriers.

Mayer pointed out that, despite its many challenges, Yahoo is still in fairly elite club of ad-supported Web companies. Only two other publicly traded companies – Facebook and Google – have more than 1 billion users, she said. Likewise, only Yahoo, Facebook and Google have more than $5 billion in digital ad revenue.

15 fabulous Fortune reads from 2014

Every year, Fortune publishes hundreds of magazine stories and thousands more online. Winnowing down the best is impossible and, for that matter, totally subjective. But we’ve tried to pick out a few from among the most compelling. They take you from the Vatican bank to a “Club Fed” prison, and from inside the struggling McDonald’s fast-food empire to the chaos at Sony Pictures after hackers breached its computer systems. It is just a sampling of what Fortune’s team does everyday. Stay tuned for much more in 2015.

Scenes from Fortune’s 40 Under 40 bash

Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list celebrates young rising stars in business and government from across the globe. Founders from some of the Internet’s hottest companies, financial wizards and media moguls are all represented. On Thursday night, this year’s honorees gathered in San Francisco. Here’s some scenes from the event.

5 things you probably don’t know about Mary Barra

General Motors’ massive recall scandal has been a disaster. More than 29 million vehicles have been pulled from the market because of faulty ignition switches linked to at least 19 deaths. In Fortune’s October 6th issue, Senior Editor At Large Geoff Colvin unpacks CEO Mary Barra’s plan to shake up GM’s infamous culture to prevent another big recall from ever happening again. Her focus is on changing the mindset of the company’s staff, which used to try to patch safety problems like the ignition switches as quickly as possible and then move on. As she says, “Culture is how people behave.” As Colvin writes, “Barra has done the opposite, telling employees at a town hall meeting, ‘I never want to put this behind us. I want to put this painful experience permanently in our collective memories.’ It was clearly the right message, but was jaw-dropping at GM.”

There has been a lot written about Mary Barra as of late, but during the reporting process, Colvin uncovered some new information on the CEO. Barra, who has worked at GM since she was 18 and enrolled at General Motors Institute to get an engineering degree, has had GM at the center of her world for practically her entire life. Here are five things that give a peek into what makes Barra tick:

1. She views feedback as a gift. As HR chief from 2009 to 2011, Barra toughened employee evaluations, including adding a rating system, which was new. “I view feedback as a gift. Everyone can improve, whether you’re day one in the job or after 40 years on your job. I tell employee forums all the time, ‘If you’re having a performance review with your boss and they don’t give you something to work on, don’t leave his or her office.’”

2. She’s unfazed by not being board chair. Some people say she’s hindered in changing the culture because authority is divided. Her response: “I have great support from my board, including my chairman, Tim Solso. He is very clear with my responsibility as management. I feel very empowered by my board. It concerns me not at all.”

3. She’s not a consensus builder like her predecessors. A previous high executive, now retired, says, “Rick Wagoner [CEO 2000 – 2009] was a consensus-builder, a time-consuming process that was sometimes successful, sometimes not. Mary doesn’t have the patience to do that.”

4. She told the world about “the GM nod.” The phrase is everywhere now that the Valukas report on the massive ignition-switch recalls has highlighted it, but not many people know who told the investigators about it. “Mary Barra described a phenomenon known as the ‘GM nod.’ The GM nod, Barra described, is when everyone nods in agreement to a proposed plan of action, but then leaves the room with no intention to follow through, and the nod is an empty gesture,” says the Vaulkas report.

5. She has a military-grade leadership style. A former U.S. Army general thinks she’s an excellent leader. Thomas Kolditz, who retired as a brigadier general after teaching leadership at West Point, now teaches at the Yale School of Management. His view: “I’m a huge Mary Barra fan and think she’s doing about as good a job as anybody could do. It’s going to take a while to get the whole thing fixed and going in the right direction. But I think she’s doing a great job.”

Andy Serwer, managing editor of Fortune, to step down

Fortune’s managing editor, Andy Serwer, will leave the magazine this summer after serving in his role for eight years, Time Inc. announced Tuesday.

Alan Murray, who spent more than two decades at The Wall Street Journal, will be Serwer’s successor. Murray most recently served as president of the Pew Research center, and at the Journal oversaw its digital operations. He also previously worked at the Journal’s Washington, D.C., bureau. Murray left the newspaper in late 2012 to take the job at Pew.

The change at the top of Fortune comes less than two months after Time TIME, which also owns People, Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated, was spun off from former parent Time Warner TWX. The spinoff comes at a challenging time for the publishing industry, which has struggled to adapt to the digital world as more readers look to social media, blogs and other web properties to get their news fix.

Though industrywide magazine sales have faltered, Fortune is still a well-established brand. The magazine’s Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations is widely cited, and the company has built an expanding conference business. Even in a challenging ad environment, Fortune‘s revenue has risen 6% in the first half of 2014, with ad pages up 3%, according to PIB.

Serwer, the longest serving managing editor since the 1980s, oversaw the relaunch and redesign of Fortune‘s magazine and website and led a major expansion of the company’s conference division. He also oversaw the separation of Fortune.com from CNNMoney earlier this year and launched the magazine’s iPad edition. Serwer has worked at Fortune for over 29 years.

Inside the all-new Fortune.com

Welcome to the all-new Fortune.com! It’s a new day for us here at Fortune, and we’re excited to share it with you.

Visit us daily at Fortune.com and you’ll find everything from short takes on breaking news to smart analysis of market-moving events in the global corporate world. In addition, you’ll find the in-depth, long-form journalism you’ve come to expect from us since the Fortune brand was launched 84 years ago. Fortune.com is a fast-paced business news site that delivers access, analysis, and opinion in any format that fits the screen — stories, videos, newsletters, photography, interactive graphics, and more.

Our new site has been designed specifically for today’s businessperson – it’s responsive to any size screen, so you’ll have the same sleek and clutter-free experience on your mobile phone, tablet or desktop. Use the menu on the top left to navigate through the site, or scroll through our article feed at your leisure. The Fortune 500 and our other franchises have never been easier to view — you can sort and filter data from companies and executives around the globe on one page.

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